crash and begin
by edeabeth
Summary: (part two in Crash Course) sometimes it's difficult to get your life in order, and sometimes it's difficult to let go. (torture, PTSD, S.H.I.E.L.D bashing)


Natasha had never really known the feeling of complete relief when every afternoon on the dot she would find both Steve and Rep waiting for her outside the University. Sometimes Clint would be there, Steve's hand firmly grasping his collar in similar fashion to the leash he kept gripped in his hand that stopped Rep from racing forward.

University proved to be an interesting experience. It had only been a month of taking classes on history, law and English but she enjoyed it. Tony had selected her courses while allowing her minimal input. He had seemed to know what he was doing, and suddenly she was a student under the name Nadia Rushmore. The entire experience was something so incredibly different.

Waking up every morning in her apartment left her feeling almost giddy with the realization that she had finally been given a home. It was larger than it was really needed to be, with four extra bedrooms that each of the Avengers typically crashed in frequently. It had become usual to stumble upon either Bruce or Steve cooking or even find Clint sleeping in the bathtub.

Before the disastrous mission that nearly killed her she had remained distant from the Avengers. She'd kept walls up to keep herself shielded from them but they had all crumbled in their delicate attempts to lure her into the circle of family, as Tony claimed it was. Steve went running with her while Tony carefully redesigned her widow bites. Bruce brought her a tea made from his special stash while Clint just kept jumping out of the damn vents at any given chance.

Since the mission the entire group had become almost obsessive to keep her safe. Tony kept placing trackers on her shoes and weapons as well as Rep's dog tags. Clint would often follow from a distance when she was out while Bruce kept himself busy with making her lunches for school.

And Steve was simply himself.

.

"How was class?" Steve asked her as she drew nearer. He looked at ease amongst the crowd of students milling about, many sporting Avenger themed attire. It was more uncommon to not wear the graphic images of superheroes.

She shrugged. "Long. Russian revolution is only so interesting when an English man butchers the entire significance to it."

"Tony could teach it better," he said as he handed her the leash. She kneeled down and began scratched behind Rep's ears.

"He could," she snorted, "He's probably started a revolution by himself."

.

She was seated cross legged on her table with a laptop directly in front of her. She'd shed the long sleeved sweater due to the heat of the summer and now her scars that weren't covered by her tank top were on display. She had at first felt awkward due to Tony and Steve sitting in her apartment watching an old war movie on her TV.

"What I'm saying, is that these guns are why they lost the war," Tony announced suddenly. Natasha looked up from the essay she was writing as Steve sighed in exasperation. "With better types of guns they could have won."

Steve gave him a dark look. "It was the better men who won."

Tony gave him a cheeky grin in return as he jumped up from the couch, "I love doing that. You get so riled up and look so damned manly."

"Keep it down. Natasha's working on a paper," he informed him sullenly.

"Can't have you getting your lady friend all upset, can we?" Tony smirked. "If you ever need any advice on what to do with the ladies, just call me. I'll sort you out."

"What makes you think he needs any help with women?" Natasha asked in a smooth voice, grinning sharply as Tony began fiddling with the buttons of his shirt.

He gave a hasty shrug. "He's Mr. Gentleman. The most chivalrous of them all."

"Well, Mr. Well Mannered. I do recall you spent some time with a group of women dressed in little more than body glitter and feathers." Natasha said thoughtfully to Steve. "Or am I wrong? Is that Bruce that I'm thinking of?"

"Probably," he grinned.

Tony gave her a long stare. "You think you're brilliant, don't you?"

"Of course I do."

.

Natasha wrapped her arms around her knees and sobbed. There was broken glass on the floor and the apartment was emptied of anyone else besides herself. Blood smeared across the floor from her foot, making her cry out from the stinging of the cut.

Gasping she reached for her phone and sent a single text message to Steve, a single digit for him to receive. _1\. _

The number was designed to send anyone of the Avengers straight to her location if she went through a panic attack. Steve had left only minutes ago to take her dog for a walk while she had started to do the dishes left over from the night before. A wine glass had slipped through her grasp and shattered across the floor.

"_Crawl on your hands and knees," Uncle Ivan demanded the girls as they gazed hollowly at the floor covered in nails, wire and glass. "Whichever one stops first I shoot." _

_Instantly they had dropped, determined to outlast the person next to them. One girl screamed in pain as a large rusted nail pierced her knee and a gun went off. Someone called out Clara and suddenly two little girls were crumpled up in the wreckage dismantled across the floor. "Keep going! I'll shoot the next time you stop!"_ A dog barked in the distance.

"Natasha!"

_Her palms were sliced open and her eyes stung with tears she was unwilling to shed. They crawled across the massive room on shaky limbs for hours, waiting for the weakest to give in and to simply stop. It took nearly eight hours for Julia to slam her head against a jagged piece of glass. She didn't die painlessly like the girl had attempted. The glass shattered and sliced her forehead open while she sobbed and muttered words that didn't connect. 'mother' and 'please' were repeated feverishly while Ivan slowly strode through the mess in heavy boots. _

_He shot her in the spine, something like glee gleaming in his eyes. "Take the bodies to pits." _"Tash!"

_Uncle Ivan lifted Natasha off the floor by the collar of her shirt and grinned as she hung in the air with no struggle. "Like a kitten you are." He informed her before waving to the men in white uniforms. "Kill the rest." _

_She watched her friends be tossed into a trench. Natasha had seen such mass graves before, Russia was riddled with them. They were the foundation of the Red Room, if she were to be honest. The massive stone building sat surrounded by mass graves filled with the damned. A doctor stitched her wounds up as she watched the crumpled bodies be heaved into the grave one by one and eventually Uncle Ivan pushed her down into the ground in her own little grave before straddling her._

She felt something cold be pressed into her hand. She looked down and didn't see the bloodied palms and black stitches but an ice cube. Steve was crouched in front of her with a determined look in his eyes. "Is he still alive?"

"Who?" she spoke in a hoarse voice. She'd been screaming, she realized.

"Uncle Ivan."

Natasha looked him hard in the eye before nodding. "He's still running the Red Room project."

He frowned at her. "You were sent to kill him, weren't you? That mission. That's why it was so sensitive."

She gave him a shrug. "He saw through my disguise and had guards drug me with a gas. After that he locked me away."

"Ivan raped you, didn't he? When you were a child."

She shrugged. "Many bad things happened. He just was the ruler of bad things."

.

Thor's arrival brought a flurry of media gathered around Stark Tower under the belief that the Avengers were indeed there. Instead a man in a purple hoodie walked down the street while Jarvis controlled the robot Iron Man who flew over the skies of New York. A man drove a plain car with another, sporting a rather terrible disguise of a fake moustache and hipster glasses.

Steve greeted them at the door as Tony and Natasha sat across from one another with tea between them.

"Goldilocks!" Tony said to him as he ripped the moustache off his face. "Pleasure to see you."

"It is always a pleasure to see good friends," the man said to them all. "This, however, is a change. S.H.I.E.L.D is apparently a snake, once again."

Clint shrugged. "They're kind of shady in that way."

"With all of the designing weapons, hiring assassins for hire and breaking almost every international law there is, they really are all sorts of sketchy." Tony added as Bruce began heating water up in the kettle for tea. "I thought we got you a coffee maker."

Steve pulled out a couple of tea cups from the shelf while side stepping the Golden Retriever that had decided to sprawl on the floor in the kitchen. Natasha gave Clint a warning as he attempted to feed Rep a slice of pizza from God knows where. "Coffee makes me jittery."

"And you need to be steady like a rock," he nodded sternly. "Anyways, the coffee maker was for me."

She rolled her eyes. "Drink tea or arsenic. Your choice."

"You're a brilliant hostess, aren't you?"

"Lady Widow is indeed a hostess that should be held in high regard." Thor proclaimed. "I tell many stories of her to the people of Asgard. Lady Sif is an icon of a female warrior, and Lady Widow only strengthens the idea of a woman able to carry out the title of a warrior. I think very highly of you."

Natasha gave him a smile, showing a flash of her teeth. "I think very highly of you as well."

"So why did you come here, anyways? There isn't another alien invasion, right?"

"I am running away," he told them in a firm tone. "The idea of ruling Asgard no longer gives me content feeling. I want to become more part of your world."

Clint smirked. "Only if you play laser tag with me."

.

Natasha had to pick the pair of them up at the police station and sighed at the news of three buildings devastation in their attempts to discover who really was the greatest warrior.

.

"_Do you want to live?" he whispered in the dark. The silk sheets felt strange to her as she laid there, his hands groping her body and squeezing painfully. "It's your birthday today, Natasha. You're nine. Do you want to live?"_

_She rolled her head over and looked at his dark form crouched over her and shrugged._

Steve slung an arm over her in his sleep and jolted her awake. Her movement woke him as well, as suddenly they were lying face to face.

"All the beds were taken," he mumbled. "Stark steals the blankets."

She smirked as she tugged the blankets slightly.

.

"Do you have any food?" Clint demanded at three in the morning.

Natasha stood there glaring at him before she slammed the door in his face.

"I'll just order a pizza!" his muffled voice shouted through the door.

.

She sat in the back of the lecture hall in clear view of the two large doors. Her made-by-Tony-Stark-and-will-out-last-everything laptop was positioned in front of her with a blank word document opened. Someone slid in the chair next to her and leaned closer.

Natasha looked up at the student with the dark hair and poor eye brows. "Yes?"

"How old are you?" He asked her in a low voice as he shuffled his chair nearer. "You don't look like a first year."

"I'm twenty six." She informed him blankly before swiveling to look at him dead on with an expressionless face. Natasha forced herself not to look at the rather furry eyebrows.

"You wanna get coffee after this?"

"No."

He grabbed he knee and suddenly he was flipped onto his back several feet away. He mumbled and moaned as he clutched his head. "Bitch kicked me!" He whined to his friends who huddled around him. The girls sitting around her traded large grins to one another as Natasha spun back around in her seat, not willing to show how my her foot ached from kicking the plastic chair up.

"No means no," she informed him in a bored tone, smirking at the sight of his friends trying to pull him up off the floor.

.

"Steve informed me your disappearance," Thor said quietly as she handed him a cup of Earl Grey. "I'm sorry I was unable to be of service."

"Steve should keep silent," she said in a tense voice.

"I meant no harm. I just wanted to offer you my sincere apologies, and wish to offer you any aid in demolishing this Ivan."

Natasha's head snapped up and suddenly the hot tea cup in her hands wasn't so noticeable. Steve had the unfortunate luck of walking into the apartment carrying groceries. She waited until he had set them down before flinging the cup at him, missing on purpose of course, because no matter how angry she was she hadn't really wanted to hurt him. While he crouched down out of the way from dangerous tea cups she snatched up her emergency bag and stalked out of her apartment, leaving the door wide open behind her.

Steve shouted at her, angry words bleeding with confusion while she ignored it. Rep chased after her while Thor called out to her. Rep whined frantically at her as she stood at the entrance steps of the apartment building, the streets roaring in front of her and her heart pounding in her chest. He held his leash in his mouth, the end of it trailing in the ground. She sat down very slowly on the steps as he hands clutched the strap of the duffle bag.

She had three thousand dollars in various currencies as well as three different IDs. A change of clothes and a handful of weapons. Both she and Clint both kept a bag on hand in cash of fallout, neither of them capable of breaking the habit.

Despite the ability she had to just leave New York behind and take off for somewhere new, perhaps Scotland, she couldn't. It was possible but difficult to have her dog flown to some faraway place with her under such short notice and she didn't want to start over.

Natasha had found both a home and a family. Her home technically didn't exist under proper records and her family left a trail of destruction in their wake. Steve might have carelessly told details of her past to Thor, but that didn't mean he was terrible.

She sat there on the steps watching the people and traffic pass by in front of her while Rep sprawled out by her feet. Steve sat down very slowly next to her. "Are you going to throw something at me again?" He asked, and despite how light he said it there was something tense in his tone. She took out a knife from her boot and held it up between them as a silent warning before slipping it back safely.

"You told Thor about Ivan," she informed him sharply. "Why did you think you had any right to do so?"

He held his hands up. "I never told him what exactly he did to you."

"But you told him anyways. Why would you even tell Thor?" Natasha demanded in a hard tone, the voice she reserved for integrations. It made her sound cold and distant, and she appreciated it as a defensive barrier. "He didn't have to know. Why should he know about any of this?"

"The Avengers will avenge your childhood," Steve said very quietly. "I told Thor that Ivan is a terrible man who made you suffer. He controlled the Red Room and was responsible for your recent disappearance. Thor cares very much for you. He considers you as a sister that he wants to protect from harm."

"That doesn't mean you had a right," she said icily, anger slowly fading as she sat in the warm sun.

He nodded. "I know. I didn't. I should have told you first before even mentioning it to Thor."

Natasha cocked her head at him. "You owe me a strawberry pie." She ordered as she stood up and hefted up her emergency bag, suddenly feeling like an awkward burden in her grip. The city roared around the two, and suddenly the desire to run away faded.

.

There is nothing more ridiculous, she discovered, than fully grown men (plus one God) singing along to Let It Go on the top of their lungs.

.

Natasha knocked firmly on the door for the seventh time. She'd been knocking repeatedly on her neighbour's door for the past week before she finally caved and slipped out a bobby pin from her pocket and crouched down. Within seconds the door was unlocked and she cautiously swung it open.

"Hello?" she called out as she slowly walked into the empty apartment. It was a replica of her own, minus any furniture.

The apartment could have been identical except for the three large Iron Men standing in the middle of the living room. As she neared they sprung into movement, suddenly saluting her.

A five minute search of all the rooms on both her floor and the one below proved that every apartment was occupied by the robotic security.

Natasha yanked her phone out of her pocket and dialed Pepper's number as she leaned against the counter and waited. After exactly three rings the woman's voice greeted her. "Hello, Pepper," Natasha smiled thinly. "What exactly does Tony define as security?"

There was a slight pause. "I'm not quite sure. Was there an intruder?" She asked in a worried tone. "Are you alright?"

"I was just curious, because it appears that this entire building has been bought out by Tony, and each room seems to be filled with Iron Men. I was just wondering if perhaps this is what Tony considered to be a security system." Natasha said thoughtfully as she watched the robotic security guards.

"TONY!" Pepper suddenly shouted.

He suddenly appeared on the phone. "I take it that you discovered the other tenants."

"Tenants constructed of wires and metal?"

"Yes, I suppose those would be the tenants."

She waited exactly five seconds before saying very softly, "thank you, Tony."

.

Natasha sat down across from the man wearing sunglasses. "I've noticed you following me. I think you're losing your touch."

He snorted. "Agent Romanoff. I was wondering if you'd lost your touch."

"No longer an agent." She shrugged. "Are we doing small talk, or we jumping into the issue?"

"I do hate bullshit."

Natasha smirked. "So what are you following me for?"

"You know, I was against the council." He said as he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. "I never supported them in what they did to you."

"You also never attempted to stop them."

"That is correct."

The waitress placed a cup of coffee in front of Fury before walking away. "So, are you here to drag me off? You should know that Barton is currently staking the place out. Stark and Thor are waiting just outside the doors, and you should wave. Rogers and Banner are in that corner there."

Fury dutifully lifted his hand up in recognition to the two men sitting across the room. "No. You need to know though, that things are going south. I haven't told the council anything about your apartment or the classes you've been taking at the University. They know nothing, and they won't hear any word of this. You're a free woman, Romanoff."

"Glad you think so."

"Just know that no matter what you hear, I'll always be about."

"I can't tell if that's meant to be reassuring or not".

.

_The girl was small but in the small space her body was an inconvenience. It laid next to her, rotting in the darkness. Natasha couldn't open the door and no one was coming. The little girl was maybe five, and her dead body was lying in a bloodied, rotting mess right next to her and Natasha couldn't escape the mess. _

.

Natasha woke up in a nest of pillows and blankets in her living room, half on top of Steve while Tony had his hand wrapped around her ankle in a secure grip as he slept on. Occasionally he mumbled something about thrusters and wires that needed to be redone while Thor snored, sprawled out with Clint trapped in his grip.

Bruce was sleeping across them all with his glasses askew.

She bit back a small smile and went back to sleep.

.

"I'm thinking about a holiday," Natasha informed Steve as he cooked dinner.

"Where you thinking?"

She gave a shrug. "I figure the hero of America should see Washington."

"I'm going with you?"

"Who else is going to cook for me?"

.


End file.
